The server for wmbuck.net (tarragon is its name) has been moved to Amazon EC2.<\/p>\n
In part this was an experiment, motivated by curiosity about the ease or difficulty of maintaining a server in the cloud. But also in part it was motivated by dissatisfaction with the previous hosting environment, superb hosting. I needed to upgrade the server capacity. It had not been improved for 7 years, and it was ancient hardware when I got it. But at superb I ran into a lot of trouble, because I wanted to use btrfs (see earlier post <\/a>about using btrfs on the home computer, oregano). Superb offers old stable kernels, but I really needed a kernel new enough to have a stable btrfs in it. After I lost all my work owing to btrfs driver problems in an old CentOS kernel, I was highly motivated to try another hosting arrangement where I could have my kernel of choice.<\/p>\n In mid May I set about creating a new tarragon. It took less than a week to set up, including all my learning curve, and all the migration issues, data transfer, etc. It has been running as wmbuck.net for over a month. The few hiccups were mistakes of transition on my part. Up to this moment I have had no problem which has turned out to be of any but my own making. For example, the lovely disk snapshot feature. The new layout maintains a separate btrfs volume for all the system data which needs to be backed up (mail, repositories, databases, web data, configurations, certificates). I use the Amazon EC2 snapshot feature to snapshot that entire volume every night. Quite apart from the normal backup scheme, this provides a very easy first level backup for any failure, and for mistakes I might make in managing the server, upgrading to new kernels, etc. This additional level of backup will amount to $8-$10 dollars a month.<\/p>\n I have also completely revised the backup strategy for all the computers now that all the linux machines have been changed over to employ btrfs. Previously I had a monthly invoice for Amazon S3 that ran around $15, but that has been cut at least in half with the new strategy. Taken together my monthly outlay for hosting+backup services is very nearly the same as it was before the change, but with a great deal of improvement in functionality, greatly increased computer power and ram, greatly increased storage on the server, and a greatly improved backup posture.<\/p>\n Overall I am very pleased with the Amazon EC2 service.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The server for wmbuck.net (tarragon is its name) has been moved to Amazon EC2. In part this was an experiment, motivated by curiosity about the ease or difficulty of maintaining a server in the cloud. But also in part it was motivated by dissatisfaction with the previous hosting environment, superb hosting. I needed to upgrade … Continue reading New Server<\/span>
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\nThe overall costs appears, so far, to be quite similar. There is still some distortion by an unusual amount of traffic as I struggle with a new backup strategy, but once that settles out I think the costs will be about the same. I think I might actually have saved money, except that I have taken advantage of features in Amazon which were unavailable in the previous arrangement.<\/p>\n